I've just started to mess around with the Ship Design section of the Empire Policy (armor, shields, torpedoes, etc.). I found it odd, though, that not all weapons were listed... what about rail guns and missile weapons? I was wondering if others had already messed with it and, if so, what they have found.

How high do these values go? Most of them are around values of 0 - 2. Any experience on how changing these numbers affect ship design? (e.g. has anyone changed these and found the AI designs are better due to their changes)

I've been editing them in-game. That way I don't mistakingly put a wrong value in! The game has the values listed as none, light, normal, heavy, very heavy. Which means in the text file, that's 0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 respectively.

I haven't found the designs to be better exactly, but it does give you more control to make each race unique, though why missiles and rail guns aren't included is unknown.

I've found that giving a heavy value in beam weapons will result in the smaller ships having less or sometimes no torpedoes, even if you've set the torpedoes to heavy also. So you can see that it's balancing everything in terms of energy usage and ships speed.

I haven't done alot of testing, this is about all I really know.

It might be worth setting up a race with low values and a race with max values and pit a design of each against each other. Probably best to make it a high and equal tech level battle between 2 ships. That would be interesting. I would expect the ship with max values would win, but maybe not as easy as we think...

So, if pirates inherit any player made designs for their own ships, it is absolute insanity to redesign those ships to be more effective. It would appear that the only way to properly play the game is as a few have alluded to in this thread, to never touch the basic designs that the pirates use, to leave them in their original, non-upgraded state, and to just use the ship sizes that pirates never use.

I do not recall ever seeing pirates use cruisers, so in theory one could be safe with those. But just to be absolutely certain, I think what I shall do from now on is to redesign the capital ship, tone it's weight down to the maximum allowed at start and build my design of it at that scale. Then build nothing but capital ships (and some troop ships, as I refuse to dilute my offensive punch by forcing my gun ships to carry troops). As I gain the ability to build bigger hulls, I'll redesign them to the maximum size and upgrade them from their smaller sizes.

Note that one always gains more offensive power for the maintenance cost from the building of the bigger ships. And if one does not absolutely need to play tagalong, and can sit in reserve as a reaction force for when pirates or space beasts show up, then there is absolutely no logic for having greater numbers so as to cover lots of territory. All one needs is sufficient reaction force in any given area to neutralize whatever threat comes up. That and perhaps an expeditionary force with a few extra ships and your troop carriers, for handling those 'special situations'.